Reflections on Recent Sculpture
November, 2003

My work, having evolved over two decades, is informed by surrealism, figuration, and modern art. Growing up female among four sisters, I bring to sculpture a skill in sewing and domestic attention that becomes something different when combined with metal skills and welding. Through experimentation I have developed a visual language that recalls something industrial, but also relates to the domestic. Working with material that is industrial evokes the future and technological progress, while domestic imagery of dresses and hand sewn coats implies ideas about nurturing what exists. Symbolic of the public and private life we navigate, the work stradles two worlds. The objects express a hopeful blending and different way of thinking.

In 1989 I began making sculpture with lace, spoons, heat vents, industrial fans, and flexible electrical conduit. I mounted these objects onto wood and painted the entire montage with a detailed painting recontexturalizing the objects themselves in relationship to a human figure. Later, I found a way to express the concept I was after more simply in free standing sculpture.

In 1998 I began stitching giant dresses and men's coats out of industrial aluminum mesh, having discovered that this material worked like a screen for images from a slide projector. The aluminum mesh evoked a sense of industry and at the same time, when used in a large scale, appeared as soft fabric. Lighting the sculptures with slide projections presented an opportunity to enhance the figure with another layer of meaning. This multi-media representation of the human form was very much a hybrid of the human figure with technological aspects. Made up of multi-layered representations, the medium worked well to express inner workings and identity ambiguity.

During the same time I developed the large video work, I also made sculpture of cast stone, in singles and multiples. They were portraits, often partly finished, sometimes cast with found objects embedded. In a recent exhibition at City Hall in Palo Alto the figures, "Child 1" were arranged in multiples on the plaza, suggesting crowds of strange, small people. Because they were cast in multiple colors, the installation suggested the multiple colors humans come in with a common thread of expression.
Working with experimental techniques, I hope to create a disorientation in order to challenge the perceptions of the world. Using a visual language of my own design, I rearrange reality for a more complex, symbolic reading.